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Postmortem: Ubi Soft China’s Music Up -- Summer Rainbow What Went Right 1. Nice storyline and cartoon style design. As mentioned, “Music Up” is a cartoon TV series. The storyline needed to be updated to make a game, and game designers of UBI Shanghai, who usually make games for foreign markets, had the opportunity handle the design. The storyline has changed. The five key teenagers are kept but another story was created and four more beautiful girls added. The setting was moved from Shanghai to Hai Nan Island in the most southern part of China, a place famous for romance.
Since all the designers involved are fans of Japanese cartoon stories and videogames, the game adopted a 2D cartoon style very much like Sakura. The local marketing and sales team supported the design. They all agreed with the project and expected a success. 2. Difficulty package divided into manageable pieces. Music Up’s 2D animation was the game’s most critical component, and it was most difficult and disputed segment of the production. I separated the animation work into three parts, with the largest change being finding another team to take over the most disputed portion of the work -- the 2D backgrounds. After the changes, the animation production went much more smoothly, though the argument over the quality never fully disappeared. We hired a professional animator (more on that later) to represent UBI China at the Hang Zhou studio producing the animation, and his presence made them more cooperative to make improvement on the disputed parts. After successfully resolving the animation issues, other parts of the project went very well. 3. Part-time professionals invited to work for the project. Since our quality controller was not professional animator, we hired a professional animator to join team part-time and represent UBI onsite in Hang Zhou and placed him in charging of quality control. With the profession animator supervising the Hang Zhou team, they turned to be much more cooperative than ever and finished the target work on time every week.
On the advice of the game designer, we attempted to replace the problematic 2D backgrounds with pre-rendered CG backdrops. However, it was impossible to find a studio in the market to make nice CG backgrounds at a bargain price. In the end, we settled on a student group to product the work. Their asking price was acceptable modest, and we suffered only a slight loss of the quality. Considering that price was the most important factor in the case, working with a student team was by far the best alternative. 4. Tight schedule. In order to meet our goal of shipping the title in the summer, everything was arranged in a tight schedule. To keep on track, we arranged to closely examine our progress weekly and monthly, making very easy to find out were the production was lagging and push the team to finish it as soon as possible. In this way we were able to avoid any last minute surprises. 5. Cooperative
team. A willing crew is the most important factor shipping a title
on time, and we had a team who highly motivated by the chance to finally
make a game for local players. I won’t say that there were any disagreement,
but the team came together to meet our goal and get the game out on time.
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